Last week, we started this series on common myths and misconceptions around back pain. The first of these was that back pain is something to be dreaded, a dire unusual event which is likely to proceed to prolonged suffering and disability. We know that this is just not true. Back pain is normal; most people will experience it, often many times in their life, and just about everyone recovers from it fairly quickly.Today, we’re going to look at the use of scans in the diagnosis of back pain.

I thought it’s about time I wrote about back pain. After all, this is the most common reason people have for coming to see me in my clinic. And it’s not just me; back pain takes up a huge amount of the time and resources of the medical care system as a whole. More people take time off work because of back pain than for any other reason and it is also the single most frequent cause of visits to GPs. It’s no exaggeration to say that there is a back pain epidemic in the UK. You’d think for something so common, we’d have a pretty good understanding of back pain but the fact is we don’t, not the general public and not always clinicians. So I’m going to list a series of back pain myths and misconceptions over the next several weeks. Most of this material is drawn from an excellent article by Mary O’Keeffe, Kieran O’Sullivan and Derek Griffin.